China reports three new coronavirus cases after first day with none

FILE PHOTO: Volunteers in protective gear measure the body temperature of a man at the entrance of a residential compound following the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, in Chuanying district of Jilin, Jilin province, China May 22, 2020. China Daily via REUTERS

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – China recorded three new confirmed COVID-19 cases on the mainland for May 23, following the first day with no new cases since the outbreak began, the National Health Commission (NHC) said in a statement on Sunday.

Of the new cases, two were imported while one was a local transmission, the NHC said.

Friday was the first time China had seen no daily rise in the number of cases since the pandemic began in the central city of Wuhan late last year.

The number of new asymptomatic cases of the coronavirus increased to 36 from 28 a day earlier, the NHC said.

The number of confirmed cases in the mainland stands at 82,974 and the death toll remained unchanged at 4,634.

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The Philadelphia Inquirer’s top editor is resigning after an uproar over a headline lamenting damage to businesses amid turbulent protests denouncing police brutality against people of color, the paper announced Saturday.

The newspaper said Stan Wischnowski, 58, was stepping down as senior vice president and executive editor.

The Inquirer had apologized for a “horribly wrong” decision to use the headline, “Buildings Matter, Too,” on a column Tuesday about looting and vandalism on the margins of protests of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis at the hands of a white police officer.

The backlash came as The New York Times was widely criticized for publishing an opinion piece by U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton advocating the use of federal troops to quell the protests.

About 30 members of the Inquirer’s 210-member editorial staff called in sick earlier this week, and black staff members angrily condemned the headline. It appeared over an article by architecture cr itic Inga Saffron, who worried that buildings damaged in violence over the past week could “leave a gaping hole in the heart of Philadelphia.”

The Inquirer drew fresh scorn after it replaced that headline online with one that read, “Black Lives Matter. Do Buildings?” Eventually, the newspaper settled on “Damaging buildings disproportionately hurt the people protesters are trying to uplift.”

The Inquirer published an apology from senior editors. Publisher and CEO Lisa Hughes said in a memo to staff that the headline was “offensive and inappropriate” and said the newspaper needed a more diverse workforce.

Wischnowski had worked at the Inquirer for 20 years and was editor when the paper won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for an in-depth investigation into violence within Philadelphia schools.

He will formally leave the newspaper June 12. Hughes did not immediately name a successor.

People walk and ride bicycles along an embankment of the Moskva River on a warm summer day, after local authorities partially lifted quarantine restrictions imposed to prevent the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Moscow, Russia June 6, 2020. Kirill Zykov/Moscow News Agency/Handout via REUTERS

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia reported 8,984 new cases of the novel coronavirus in the last 24 hours on Sunday, pushing the total number of infections to 467,673.

Officials said 134 people had died during the same period, bringing the official nationwide death toll to 5,859.

Protesters topple Confederate statue in Virginia capital

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — A small group of demonstrators toppled a statue of a Confederate general in the the former capital of the Confederacy late Saturday, following a day of largely peaceful protests in the Virginia city.

The statue of Gen. Williams Carter Wickham was pulled from its pedestal in Monroe Park, a Richmond police spokeswoman said. She said she did not know if there were any arrests or damage done to the statue.

A rope had been tied around the Confederate statue, which has stood since 1891, The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported, adding that someone urinated on the statue after it was pulled down. Photos and video from the newspaper showed the what appeared to be red paint splashed or sprayed on the statue.

In 2017, some of Wickham’s descendants urged the city to remove the statue.

Confederate monuments are a major flashpoint in Virginia and elsewhere in the South. Confederate memorials began coming down after a white supremacist killed nine black people at a Bible study in a church in South Carolina in 2015 and then again after the deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

Last week, Gov. Ralph Northam announced that a state-owned statue of former Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee would be removed from its perch on the famed Monument Avenue “as soon as possible.”

The Lee statue is one of five Confederate monuments along Monument Avenue, a prestigious residential street and National Historic Landmark district. Monuments along the avenue have been rallying points during protests in recent days over Floyd’s death, and they have been tagged with graffiti, including messages that say “End police brutality” and “Stop white supremacy.”

Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney last week announced plans to seek the removal of the other Confederate monuments along Monument Avenue, which include statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate Gens. Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart. Those statues sit on city land, unlike the Lee statue, which is on state property.

Stoney said he would introduce an ordinance July 1 to have the statues removed. That’s when a new law goes into effect, which was signed earlier this year by Northam, that undoes an existing state law protecting Confederate monuments and instead lets local governments decide their fate.

Wickham’s statue stood in Monroe Park, about a mile away from the Lee statue and surrounded by the Virginia Commonwealth University campus.